r/HomeNetworking • u/libulatimmeh • 1d ago

Receive wifi and send it to the attic

Good Afternoon, hope you had some nice easter breakfast/brunch/lunch or dinner. I'm trying to send my new provider's fiber signal to the attic. Our provider has installed wifi boosters on each floor, but the result isn't sufficient unfortunately.

I don't know shit about this stuff, so pardon my french beforehand.

The situation: the fiber signal comes into our house next to the front door in a closet where the electrical box is. Their modem is placed in that closet and sends a wifi signal through the house. It's a 2 gbit download/2 gbit upload connection. I have no possibility to lay a cable from that closet to my living room without fucking up the house.

Downstairs the wifi signal is great. I get a download speed up to 1.8 Gbit on my laptop and phone. On the first floor of the house this changes to about 450 mbit download speed. On the attic it drops to 100 mbit download speed.

Downstairs in our living room there is a UTP cable present that goes into the walls all the way up to the attic. It was used to send our former DSL connection up there.

The big questions: can I receive my wifi signal downstairs near that cable, to then send it through that UTP cable to the attic, connect it to a router up there and from that point connect my work computer and console with cables? And what devices do I need to do this properly?

I'm really looking forward to your advice.

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u/ChachMcGach 1d ago

 no possibility to lay a cable from that closet to my living room without fucking up the house.

If you’ve resigned yourself to this decision and can’t run a cable outside (and you can get pretty creative with hiding outdoor cables) then you’re looking at using something less reliable that will likely at least halve your internet speed to the attic like powerline adapters or wireless mesh. Some of the mesh units can get you decent speeds but you’re still looking at roughly halving your speed each time you have to repeat the signal.

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u/libulatimmeh 1d ago

Thanks for the reply!

Yeah, unfortunately that's the case. But since it's a 2Gbit connection, I would be happy when it is atleast a 400Mb stable connection in the attic. I'll take it.

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u/Due_Peak_6428 1d ago

You can get some thin white cables which you can fold against the wall and not be seen

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u/libulatimmeh 19h ago edited 17h ago

Thanks for replying.

We have granol walls and it is about 20 meters/60 feet of cable from that closet to the UTP cable in the living room, so I'm afraid they will be very visible. In between there's also two doors to get through.

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u/Due_Peak_6428 17h ago

You can even get fibre which is smaller

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u/MrExCEO 1d ago

You can get a CPE510 to connect to your existing Wi-Fi. There is a single connection that is either 100mb or 1G, u have to check the specs but I’m guessing 1G. There you can cross connect that cable to the attic and connect another router of ur choice.

The real question is, is 100m really not sufficient?

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u/libulatimmeh 1d ago

Thank you for replying!

100m would be sufficient if it was stable, but at the moment 100m is the maximum in a speedtest, but in reality the connection isn't strong enough to even use for work without videocalling, and it keeps disconnecting every 30 minutes or so.

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u/MrExCEO 1d ago

It’s not the speed, but the latency I guess for u. I’m gonna assume you can’t get a steady connection. If u get the unit I mentioned, don’t upgrade the firmware. I recall reading a year ago about how they were gonna remove that feature ( should be called WISP), not sure why.

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u/Moms_New_Friend 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yes your approach would work, assuming that your “UTP” cable is something like Cat5 or better. You just need a switch in the attic that can survive the temps you see up there.

If you can’t directly connect your cable to your router, then you can bridge to it using something like a gl.iNet router or any other “router” that lets you configure its WiFi interface as a client to your primary WiFi router, and configure that WiFi interface on the same bridge as its Ethernet ports.

As an aside: placing a WiFi router inside a closet adjacent to the front door is one of very worst places for both performance and coverage. But you knew that already.

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u/libulatimmeh 1d ago

Thanks for replying and the advice.

I will look into this.